korrents

korrents · Dwarkesh Podcast

Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us

Michael Nielsen · 2h 03m · youtube.com ↗

26 korrents from this recording

1h2h
Michael Nielsen did not write this page.

Every claim below is a statement made in this recording, quoted word for word and linked to the second it was said, so you can hear it rather than take our word for it. The wording comes from the transcript published alongside the recording; the sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording.

  1. 0:14:07 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Poincare missed special relativity because he knew too much: the leading physicists of the day were prisoners of their own expertise.

    Their wordshis expertise seems to be getting in the way. He knows so much, he understands so much, um and then he's not able to let go of these these things.
    Interesting
  2. 3 min later

  3. 0:17:30 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    What made the new astronomy compelling was neither accuracy nor simplicity but that one set of ideas explained three disconnected phenomena at once.

    Their wordsAnd so, you have what seem like three very different disconnected phenomena all being explained by this one set of ideas.
    Interesting
  4. 1 min later

  5. 0:18:55 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    The idea that Newton was the first modern scientist is wrong: he was a transitional hybrid, part superstitious and part modern.

    Their wordsAnd like, this idea that people have that that that Newton was um sort of the the first modern scientist is is somehow wrong. He I mean, it's there's some truth to it, but he really had this very different way um of of looking at the world that was part sort of superstitious um and part modern. It was a funny hybrid.
    Interesting
  6. 2 min later

  7. 0:20:51 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Science always bottlenecks precisely where the heuristics that worked before stop applying, which is definitionally what makes something a bottleneck.

    Their wordsthe point is that where we always get bottlenecked is where the the previous processes and and and heuristics don't apply. Right? Like that's almost sort of definitionally what causes the bottlenecks.
    Interesting
  8. 4 min later

  9. 0:24:22 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Darwin's genius was not having the idea of selection, which animal breeders already had, but seeing how central it was to the whole of biology.

    Their wordsand in some sense Darwin's genius wasn't in having that idea. It was understanding just how central it was uh to to to biology.
    Interesting
  10. 5 min later

  11. 0:29:09 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Evolution was not a thinkable theory before deep time: without hundreds of millions of years it simply looks like a nonstarter.

    Their wordsif you don't have at least sort of tens or hundreds of millions of years, uh evolution just starts to look like a nonstarter.
    Interesting
  12. 5 min later

  13. 0:34:17 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    A trained model is a new kind of object that should be taken seriously as an explanation, once we work out the operations to perform on it.

    Their wordsAnd I think the like the third and the most interesting possibility is no, that like they're they're a new type of object in some in some sense. They should be taken very seriously as as explanations, but where in the past we haven't had the ability to really do anything with them.
    Interesting
  14. 5 min later

  15. 0:39:29 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    A theory gets abandoned when the old explanation becomes visibly insufficient: special relativity made Newtonian gravity's action at a distance impossible, and that was the forcing function.

    Their wordsUm and so, it's not a big leap to realize, "Oh, we have a big problem here." Um and so, you know, that's kind of the that's the forcing function there. It's it's you've realized that your old explanation is not sufficient. You need something new.
    Interesting
  16. 3 min later

  17. 0:42:09 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Anomalies cannot be sorted in advance: the same move that found Neptune failed completely for Mercury, so a field has to pursue both answers at once.

    Their wordsAnd so you sort of you've you've pursued very similar ideas. It's been very successful in one case and it's been completely and utterly unsuccessful in the other case. And I think I mean a priori, you can't tell which of these is the thing to do. And you actually need to do both.
    Interesting
  18. 7 min later

  19. 0:48:51 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    AI has moved the programmer's bottleneck from writing code to having good design ideas, and there is no verification loop for a design idea.

    Their wordsSo certainly one thing that a lot of them seem to be bottlenecked on is now having interesting ideas and in particular having interesting design ideas.
    Interesting
  20. 3 min later

  21. 0:51:51 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    A theory of everything would not finish physics: Turing and Church laid down computation's theory of everything in the 1930s and we have spent ninety years exploring the consequences.

    Their wordsPeople will sometimes talk about um you know, a theory of everything as a potential goal for for physics. And and then there's this presumption somehow that physics is done once you get there. And of course, this is this is not true at all if you think about computer science.
    Interesting
  22. 1 min later

  23. 0:52:42 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Very deep principles lie hidden inside theories we already have: public key cryptography was already implicit in the 1930s theory of computation.

    Their wordsIdeas like public key cryptography are I mean, they're just incredibly deep um very non-obvious ideas uh which in some sense lay hidden uh already sort of in in the 1930s.
    Interesting
  24. 1 min later

  25. 0:54:01 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    We are near the bottom of the tech tree, not the top; even the list of phases of matter keeps growing and we are starting to design new ones.

    Their wordsAnd this looks to me like, oh, we're down at sort of the bottom of the tech tree. We've barely gotten started there.
    Interesting
  26. 6 min later

  27. 1:00:16 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Diminishing returns in science is a snapshot illusion: somebody keeps restocking the table, and new fields make progress easy again.

    Their wordsif somebody, you know, is standing behind the dessert table and is replenishing, restocking the desserts and keeps kind of you know, adding adding new ones in, it may turn out that you know, a little bit later a much better desserts appear.
    Interesting
  28. 6 min later

  29. 1:06:05 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Biology has already handed us an alien library: hundreds of millions of protein machines we do not understand and can only study one at a time.

    Their wordswe've been gifted uh just this incredible variety of machines which we don't understand really at all and we just have to go and sort of try and understand them on a you know, one-by-one basis.
    Interesting
  30. 3 min later

  31. 1:09:30 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Comparative advantage stops governing once the power imbalance is large enough: groups then switch into seeking to dominate instead of trading.

    Their wordsand part of it is just power, I think. Like, once there's a sufficiently large power imbalance, um, very often, not always, but very often groups of people seem to to sort of shift into this other mode where they just seek to dominate.
    Interesting
  32. 2 min later

  33. 1:11:35 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Most of the tech tree will never be explored by anyone at all, which is exactly why the choice of which direction to explore matters so much.

    Their wordsUm, there's just too many interesting ways of combining things. There's too many sort of deep ideas waiting to be uh, discovered and when it you know, not only we, but but nobody ever is going to to discover most of them. So, choices about how to make how to do the exploration actually matter quite a bit.
    Interesting

  35. 1:11:55 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Technological determinism is only believable low down the tech tree; higher up we already choose which paths not to take.

    Their wordsI'm willing to buy it sort of low enough down when, you know, progress is relatively simple, um, but but higher up you start to get to shape the way in which you you do the exploration and it's interesting, you know, people we are starting to shape it in in in interesting ways.
    Interesting
  36. 9 min later

  37. 1:20:56 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Diminishing returns in research are not intrinsic to the world: they are what you get when the institutions around research stop changing.

    Their wordsIf you're not changing it, if there's some kind of stagnation there, if you're not changing those external sort of circumstances, yes, like you may start to get sort of diminishing returns again. But that doesn't mean there's anything intrinsic about the situation.
    Interesting
  38. 8 min later

  39. 1:28:27 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Quantum computing arrived in the 1980s not because anyone got smarter but because cheap personal computers and the ability to trap single ions happened to mature at the same moment.

    Their wordsSo you kind of got these two separate things that just for historically contingent reasons had both sort of matured around sort of let's say 1980 or so.
    Interesting
  40. 15 min later

  41. 1:43:12 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    No single person can understand a result like the Higgs boson in depth, and that is what a paper with a thousand authors actually means.

    Their wordsand I don't think it's possible for one person to understand everything in depth. Lots of people understand broadly a lot of these ideas but they don't understand sort of everything in in the depth that is actually utilized. That's why there's these, you know, papers with with well over a thousand authors.
    Interesting
  42. 1 min later

  43. 1:44:38 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Creative work splits into routine work you should get fast at and high-variance work you must be willing to spend a long time on, and almost everyone is good at only one of the two.

    Their wordsthere's sort of there's two types of work that tends to be involved in any kind of creative project. There's routine stuff and there you just want to avoid procrastination. You just want to like, you know, how do I get good at this or how do I outsource it and how do I do it as rapidly as possible? Um and just avoid you know, like getting into a situation where you're prolonging it. Um, and then there's high variance stuff where you actually you need to be willing to to you know take a lot of time.
    Interesting
  44. 7 min later

  45. 1:51:23 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Ask anyone whether they would have worked the same way with a million dollars at stake and the answer is invariably no: they tried, but they did not really try.

    Their wordsif a million dollars had been at stake, like would you have put the same effort in? And the answer is no. Um sort of invariably. Um like they've tried, but they haven't really tried.
    Interesting
  46. 5 min later

  47. 1:56:28 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Being stuck is not an obstacle to understanding something; it is probably the most important part of the whole process.

    Their wordsI mean funnily enough I mean spending time stuck is incredibly important. Um and and I sort of you know, I that used to just be annoying. Now it seems like oh, this is actually um uh uh maybe even the most important part of the whole process.
    Interesting

  49. 1:56:55 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    You learn almost nothing from writing you finished in a couple of days; the pieces that took months are the ones you still remember years later.

    Their wordsI've written sometimes 10,000 word essays in you know, a couple of days and I've written them in you know, 3 months or 6 months. Uh I I feel like I did I I didn't learn very much from the ones that that that only took a couple of days.
    Interesting
  50. 5 min later

  51. 2:02:10 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    For a certain kind of mind there is a seductiveness in learning a system that gets mistaken for understanding.

    Their wordsfor a certain type of mind, there is a seductiveness in in just just learning systems and confusing that with with with understanding.
    Interesting